P. D. James

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

— P. D. James war

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

— P. D. James kindness

What a child doesnt receive he can seldom later give.

— P. D. James child

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

— P. D. James friends

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

— P. D. James god

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which arent credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.

— P. D. James people

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

— P. D. James world

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

— P. D. James art

I dont think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

— P. D. James writers

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

— P. D. James you

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

— P. D. James time

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

— P. D. James life

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

— P. D. James child

Dont just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

— P. D. James writing

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

— P. D. James life

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We dont know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

— P. D. James life

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

— P. D. James fiction

Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

— P. D. James power

First-class travel, provided one hasnt to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of lifes luxuries.

— P. D. James life

Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.

— P. D. James war

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

— P. D. James pain

Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isnt capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isnt false.

— P. D. James men

The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.

— P. D. James politics

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.

— P. D. James life

Time didnt heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

— P. D. James time

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

— P. D. James life

Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

— P. D. James suicide

youd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

— P. D. James truth

Publishers dont nurse you; they buy and sell you.

— P. D. James you

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

— P. D. James art

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

— P. D. James identity

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he cant appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

— P. D. James love

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

— P. D. James thought

Wars may be fought by decent men, but theyre not won by them.

— P. D. James war

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

— P. D. James author

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

— P. D. James art

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

— P. D. James people

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

— P. D. James value

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.

— P. D. James forgive

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

— P. D. James grief

All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who dont or cant have to do the best we can. Thats what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but its the only justice we have.

— P. D. James god

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

— P. D. James alone

we can forgive anything as long as it isnt done to us.

— P. D. James forgive

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. Its a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

— P. D. James poetry

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldnt believe that, I dont think I could go on living.

— P. D. James living

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didnt see the skull beneath the skin.

— P. D. James life

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

— P. D. James death

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

— P. D. James life

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

— P. D. James women

Childhood is the one prison from which theres no escape, the one sentence from which theres no appeal. We all serve our time.

— P. D. James time

we live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving ...

— P. D. James science

to look back on ones life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

— P. D. James life

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

— P. D. James war

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.

— P. D. James love

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

— P. D. James

A nation that cant remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

— P. D. James dying

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

— P. D. James science

I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that youre still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact.

— P. D. James people

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

— P. D. James loss

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past cant now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

— P. D. James art

There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.

— P. D. James society

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

— P. D. James time

Creativity doesnt flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

— P. D. James fear

You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

— P. D. James people

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

— P. D. James youth

A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on.

— P. D. James life

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

— P. D. James live

the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

— P. D. James success

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

— P. D. James crime

read widely, not in order to copy someone elses style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

— P. D. James writing

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

— P. D. James age

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we dont actually believe it.

— P. D. James hope

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

— P. D. James books

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasnt that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

— P. D. James people

Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.

— P. D. James sex

If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, dont you think?

— P. D. James god

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

— P. D. James death

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

— P. D. James hope

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

— P. D. James hope

I dont want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

— P. D. James love

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

— P. D. James god

He didnt want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is. Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didnt love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the worlds poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

— P. D. James love

It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words justice, compassion, society, struggle, evil, would be unheard echoes on an empty air.

— P. D. James passion

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

— P. D. James men

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you havent a chance of getting.

— P. D. James men

We are often more merciful to our animals [cats] than we are to each other.

— P. D. James cats

Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.

— P. D. James life

It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.

— P. D. James life

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

— P. D. James war

But what do you believe? I dont just mean religion. What are you sure of? That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.

— P. D. James religion

I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

— P. D. James love

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

— P. D. James world

Perhaps its only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that its too late then for them to do anything about it.

— P. D. James people

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

— P. D. James mind

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

— P. D. James life

I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.

— P. D. James people

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

— P. D. James death

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